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Out of Context QUOTATION: What does history have in store for architecture today? Out of Context Penelope Dean University of Illinois at Chicago Abstract In 1980, the Italian product company Alessi invited eleven historicist postmodern architects to design tea and coffee sets. The assembled architects deployed architectural quotations to add signature to small-scale utilitarian objects, transforming products into miniature buildings, and elevating them into “art”. Significantly, this exercise in formal citation was divorced from scholarly writing and drawing, taking place outside the academy and within industry. Quotation was not a technique solicited by the architectural historian, or even by the practicing architect, but by an architecturally aware businessman, in other words, a client. This paper focuses on the ways in which Alessi’s commissioning of architects to design tea and coffee sets was an exercise in using quotation for unlikely ends: namely the production of a niche market for luxury products. It shows how architects—ranging from Michael Graves to Stanley Tigerman— injected signature (via quotation) into typicality (the mass-produced object) and argues that their collective efforts enabled the Alessi company to shift its status from a local workshop into a global company. Quotation was not only the means to diversify products; it was also a means for market elevation. While Alessi’s embrace of architectural quotation was certainly indebted to a rising consumer culture driven by a demand for individualised choices, at the same time it evidences the passing of quotation as a disciplinary concern into a commercial strategy: from establishing historical tradition to expanding product visibility; from making connections to articulating product differences. In this regard, Alessi offers surprising lessons for quoting out of context, for turning academic convention into market opportunity. 136 Out of Context In every good architect, there is a tendency toward naturalism—in other words, a tendency to reproduce what exists.1 In his introduction to Officina Alessi’s Tea & Coffee Piazza catalogue (1983), Alessandro Mendini described the Alessi company’s commissioning of eleven architects to design tea and coffee sets as an opportunity to “put forward experimental methods, forms and typologies in the thick of the current debate on neo and post-modernism” taking place in new Italian and international design.2 Indeed, the invited architects—Michael Graves, Hans Hollein, Charles Jencks, Richard Meier, Mendini, Paolo Portoghesi, Aldo Rossi, Stanley Tigerman, Oscar Tusquets, Robert Venturi, and Kazumasa Yamashita—represented the chief protagonists of the historicist postmodernist set, all of whom (with the exception of Mendini) had been identified by Charles Jencks as working with syntax, irony, semantics, symbolism, metaphor, or decoration in the revised and enlarged 1978 edition of The Language of Post Modern Architecture.3 Most had participated in the 1980 Venice Biennale, “Presence of the Past”, curated by fellow Piazza designer Paolo Portoghesi and by Mendini’s own admission, it was “a relatively homogeneous group of architects” adding their signatures to small runs of domestic objects.4 These “signatures” would rely heavily on quotation: not of words, but fragments of buildings; not at one-to-one scale but reduced dimension, not verbatim but by approximation. In fact, quoted content would transgress mediums and domains, passing from architecture into industrial design, out of the academy into industry. The translations would account for the market success of the new Alessi products that acquired the status of art objects, exhibited at the Chiesa di San Carpoforo/Centro Internazionale di Brera in Milan and the Max Protetch Gallery in New York, and bought by wealthy collectors worldwide.5 As art, the Piazzas elevated the company's standing into international stature. Good quotation was apparently good business. Alberti Alessi had conceived of the high-end line of products in 1980. His invitation to Mendini, who in turn invited the post-modern architects, originated within the company’s new “Officina Alessi” workshop, a studio dedicated to formal and stylistic innovation but not committed to mass production. That activity remained under the purview of Alessi’s existing factory, which specialised in making restaurant and household products ranging from coffee pots, to trays, pans, cutlery, tongs, wire baskets, fruit bowls, serving dishes, ice buckets, shakers, condiment sets, and butter dishes, en masse. In the rarefied context of Officina Alessi, architects styled design tea and coffee services in limited design runs (up to 99) in sterling silver. There, quotation was served on a silver platter. Figure 1. Alessi Tea & Coffee Piazzas, 1980-1983. From left to right: row one, Michael Graves, Oscar Tusquets, Stanley Tigerman, Richard Meier, Kazumasa Tamashita, Robert Venturi; row two, Aldo Rossi, Charles Jencks, Hans Hollein, Paolo Portoghesi, Alessandro Mendini. SAHANZ 2017 Annual Conference Proceedings QUOTATION: What does history have in store for architecture today? The commission extended a long tradition of partnerships between architects and industry, but under changed economic circumstances. For example, with its limited editions, designer “signatures”, and emphasis on handcraft, the workshop emulated the ambitions and atmosphere of the Wiener Werkstätte. Yet the timing of Officina Alessi’s interest in postmodern signature was not about the repudiation of mass production as it had been for the Werkstätte, but heralded an engagement with image culture at the height of rising cult of personality. Further, the commissioning of architects to design products channeled the AEG’s hiring of Peter Behrens to design teakettles in 1910. Yet Alessi’s brief, which eschewed the AEG’s invitation to a single architect to design diverse objects, for invitations to many architects to design a single object, was symptomatic of the demands of mass consumerism. The swerve inevitably generated a different kind of unity among objects: for Officina Alessi, unity was achieved through eclecticism; for the AEG, it had been achieved through standardisation. Finally, by placing Officina Alessi alongside Alessi’s regular factory, the company simultaneously invoked the oppositional positions of the Deutscher Werkbund debates: if Muthesius’s standardisation characterised Alessi’s primary activity since the 1950s, van de Velde’s individualisation was the raison d’être of Officina Alessi. The co-existence of both ideologies signaled a shift in economic ambition: from establishing national identity through mass produced objects to establishing an international one in parallel through artistic signatures. In this regard, Officina Alessi owed much to two contemporaneous Milan-based design studios exploring the larger relationship between design culture and consumer society: the collective Studio Alchimia, launched in 1976 by Alessandro Guerriero with Alessandro Mendini, and the Memphis Group, founded by Ettore Sottsass Jr. in 1981. In both studios, small production runs and unique prototypes existed alongside or even before mass production, not in opposition to it. 6 Studio Alchimia was a post-radical workshop conducting research into the aesthetic possibilities of everyday environments through popular imagery, pastel colors, and visual copying; Memphis was a collaborative seeking to add emotive expression to domestic objects, furniture, and interiors. Here Alessi’s Tea and Coffee Piazza brief channeled Sottsass’s understanding of “expression” as the primary task of the invited architects, which perhaps explains the paradoxical pairing of Sottsass’s optimistic approach with that of his more pessimistic alter ego, Mendini. As a collection, the Tea and Coffee Piazzas prioritize the disciplinary concerns of architecture—form, scale, and typology, building morphology—over the challenges of the series-made industrial object.7 Three kinds of content are referenced across the eleven designs: building parts, body parts, and other teapots. In different ways, formal quotation introduces and re-enacts architectural content to, and within, product design. For example, the services designed by Graves, Jencks, and Rossi all cite building parts. Graves’s six- piece service with its square, sectioned bodies and rippled surfaces referencing fluted columns, approximate elements from classical buildings. Legs to each vessel are capped with truncated, black Bakelite pedestals, top corners adorned with blue lacquered aluminum baubles, lids shaped into truncated cones, and handles composed of “mock ivory” in elliptical curves. Graves’s clunky set looks like an awkward group of buildings—a micro architecture for the table. Here quotation undermines monumentality. Jencks’s five-piece “columns” service, an ironic take on the classical orders of architecture, is strikingly similar to, if a petite, version of Paolo Portoghesi’s Strada Novissima entry for the 1980 Venice Biennale. In this copy of a copy, stout columns, now emptied of a supporting role, adopt the characteristics—not proportions—of the orders: a Corinthian coffee pot, an Ionic teapot, a Doric milk jug, and a broken-sugar-bowl column. The columns, devoid of spouts, handles and bases, descend in chronological sequence on a stepped stylobate tray.8 Other than the implied hierarchy of purpose provided by the orders, the column-pots are primitive in utilitarian terms. Indeed, Jencks’s service 138 quotes and empties the columns not only
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